Saturday

I left my hostel at 10am and headed out, but I didn’t find the right bus stop. It was called “Cribb St” and I walked along the whole street without finding it, then I ran into the Milton rail station. Turns out the bus stop would have been on the street that crossed cribb st and had the name because it was near that street, not on it.

Woo-what? WWOOFing!
Willing Workers On Organic Farms, see this link for further information.

I bought the membership on Tuesday at my hostel and spent most time yesterday in reading the announcements and deciding whom to contact. In the end I contacted 3 places and got 1 positive response until this morning. Tomorrow I’ll go by bus to a suburb of Brisbane, Jamboree Heights, and stay with a family there for approximately 1-2 weeks, before I continue my journey up the east coast.

Today we went to Manly, a suburb of Brisbane. Yes, Sydney has a suburb named “Manly” as well, but I already told you that Australians are not the most creative with giving names to places.

In Brisbane’s Manly there is the Royal Queensland Yacht Squadron, a pretty big yacht club. On Wednesdays they do a regatta (a race) and offer free sailing to guests. They enjoy showing the fun of sailing to other people and they lack personel for their crews 😀

Sunday afternoon I checked in at the Yellow Submarine Backpackers where Nicole already awaited me. We share a cool 4bed dorm with another German. After unloading our baggage we headed to the next Coles to buy groceries, because the following day was a public holiday (Queen’s birthday) where the shops were supposed to be closed.

At first I planned to either spend 1 day in Surfers Paradise or completely skip it. Then I decided to stay for 3 nights and use the hostel’s special “Book 2 nights, get one free”. Finally I extended my stay to a whole week 😀 Surfers is really nice.

Nicole, Monique and I were looking through lots of information material about tours into the hinterland of the Gold Coast. One flyer especially caught my attention, it sounded really great: MountainTrekAdventures

Sunday

I travelled from Byron Bay to Surfers Paradise. I checked out around 9.30am and waited in the hostel’s courtesy bus. At 10 an very chilled guy came by, apparently he had left his bed and went straight to the bus to drop me at the bus stop and collect newly arrived backpackers.